More Awesome Than Money

by Jim Dwyer

  “Diaspora doesn’t have to topple the entrenched giants in order to inspire positive changes in the industry; it just has to get a critical mass of people to start thinking more seriously about privacy issues and the right kind of interoperability.”

  —

  On the Monday after Thanksgiving, Max returned to the Pivotal offices with a long list of things to do. The release of the alpha version meant that they had kept the second of the two large promises: to put out a working set of code for other developers to hack on, and to run their own node for supporters.

  The Italian edition of the fashion magazine Vogue was calling to set up a photo shoot; Daniel Grippi was of unmistakable Italian descent. A company that tracked the number of people working on open-source projects found that Diaspora was consistently among the top two or three in the world. Every day, on average, nine hundred links on the web pointed to Diaspora. The next largest open-source project on the web had three hundred, and most had around thirty to forty-five. “It’s quite astonishing,” said Philip Marshall, an executive with Ohloh, which ran a search engine that tracked open-source projects. They were declared rookies of the year by Ohloh, and one of the top ten start-ups by ReadWriteWeb.

  And they even inspired a small cultural war when a person who went by the name of Avery Morrow, an early supporter of the project who had also been documenting their progress in a blog, publicly renounced it. He took exception to their failure to just have a simple drop-down box for users to choose “male” or “female” in their profiles. Instead, they had left the box blank so that people could identify themselves. Wrote Morrow: “This is a sign that the programming team—not some unrelated pinheads, but the five or six people who are supposed to be writing the code—have put strong, usable code last on their priorities.”

  Sarah Mei, the developer with Pivotal, had created the gender box and explained why on a web post.

  “I made this change to Diaspora so that I won’t alienate anyone I love before they finish signing up.

  “I made this change because gender is a beautiful and multifaceted thing that can’t be contained by a list. I know a lot of people aren’t there with me yet. So I also made this change to give them one momentary chance to consider other possibilities.

  “I made it to start a conversation.

  “I made it because I can.

  “And, of course, I made it so you can be a smartass.”

  Writing on the blog Econsultancy, Patricio Robles said it was a sign of how unserious Diaspora was, compared with Facebook.

  “Facebook develops new features, of course, based on an analysis of real-world usage, and when it ships new code, it iterates as necessary based on the feedback it receives from real users. Diaspora, on the other hand, isn’t even out of private alpha and one developer has already single-handedly decided how one of the most important fields will function with implications for data consistency, search and usability being brushed aside. ‘To start a conversation,’ and because she can.

  “That’s not likely to be the foundation of a successful consumer internet product.”

  Perhaps the most striking reaction to their arrival was an article in Scientific American published just the day before their alpha release, in an issue marking the twentieth anniversary of the invention of the World Wide Web. Its principal creator, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, bemoaned the increasing strictures that were shrinking the autonomy and the privacy of individuals. He saw the silos of giant social networks draining the web of its vitality. He hailed Diaspora as one of the projects making a path to a healthier web. Berners-Lee had transformed the world. He had never attempted to patent his conception. So this pack of pizza-eating, sneaker-wearing, scruffy college kids was being praised for their vision by an authentic giant.

  None of them even knew about the Berners-Lee salute; they were absorbed with other, more immediate developments.

  After Dan got off his flight, he called Max from the San Francisco airport to let him know that he was on his way downtown.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “I’m here working with Rafi,” Max replied.

  “What about Ilya?” Dan asked.

  “I have some news,” Max said.

  Ilya had already called that morning.

  He wanted to go back to school, and he would be checking with NYU to see how he could resume classes in the new year. So he wasn’t returning to San Francisco. Max replayed the conversation that he and Ilya had had the week before, when he thought he had extracted a promise from Ilya to stay with the project until at least the beginning of December. He was stunned by the call.

  “I was like, ‘Fuck you, dude,’” Max said.

  They were getting crushed by work. Ilya might not have been a great coder, but they had no end of tasks that would not tax his skills. Even just keeping track of the submissions for revised code, or getting feedback from the Real People now using the site. It was treacherous for Ilya to walk with no notice. Striding through the gleaming arrival hall of the airport, Dan screamed obscenities into the phone.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  By the late fall of 2010, an undeclared, all-out worldwide war was raging across cyberspace. A private in the U.S. Army had downloaded gigabytes of classified intelligence communications and passed them along to the operators of a website called WikiLeaks. Thousands of classified cables and documents written by U.S. diplomatic and intelligence officials were posted by WikiLeaks.

  Almost immediately, a massive cyberattack began on the Swedish provider that hosted the WikiLeaks website. The attackers were not identified, but the website was bombarded with requests for communication at the rate of ten gigabytes per second. The requests were generated by robots, not people. The provider of the hosting service had to shut down the WikiLeaks site in order to preserve the rest of its business. Peter King, a New York congressman, urged the Obama administration to declare that the site and its best-known figure, Julian Assange, were terrorists and spies. WikiLeaks then moved to Amazon’s cloud service because its structure had vast elasticity and the robustness to absorb the cyberattacks. Senator Joseph Lieberman said that he planned to question Amazon about its relationship with WikiLeaks. Within a day, Amazon canceled its hosting relationship with the website. WikiLeaks went back to its Swedish host, but then lost its DNS provider, the system that translates a domain name into a physical address. It then moved to a domain controlled by the Swiss Pirate Party, one of a hub of digital libertarian, anticopyright political organizations on the rise in Europe.

  “Despite its name, ‘cyberspace’ runs on physical infrastructure that sits in various governmental jurisdictions, and when sites like Wikileaks start irritating those governments, sovereignty is quite powerfully brought to bear,” Nate Anderson wrote on the technology website Ars Technica.

  A collective of digital activists—hacktivists—operating under the flag of “Anonymous” began what they called retaliatory strikes against the websites of governments and corporations that were at odds with WikiLeaks.

  —

  On December 3, the three remaining Diaspora partners opened their e-mail to find a message from Ilya, his first communication since he’d called Max to say that he wasn’t coming back.

  The subject line was “Thank you for understanding.”

  He had been to two doctors, he reported, and although there was no final diagnosis, it appeared that he had developed over the previous three months some unspecified “medical conditions” and the doctors had ordered him not to make any “life-changing decision.” He presumed the doctors would fix his problem within the next four weeks, and he would be getting plenty of exercise. They should hold back on his December allowance and use it for the project in the future.

  In accordance with his doctors’ recommendation, he wrote, he wanted to withdraw his resignation, as “it might be erroneous due to my medical condition.” After four weeks
, he said, he hoped to be totally fine.

  “I need your support now,” he concluded.

  There was nothing for the other three to do but go back to work.

  About a week later, Stephanie, worried that Ilya was locking himself away from the world, prodded him in a surprising way: she posted a link on his Facebook page for a party and lecture marking the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Courant Institute, which housed the molten core of mathematics at NYU. Moreover, the featured speaker was Michael Shelley, a professor of math and neural sciences for whom they both had huge regard.

  “Come!!” she wrote. “Mike Shelley, who could say no? :D”

  He did not reply to her entreaty, and when she phoned him a few days later, he declined again.

  As she had before, she suggested that she would take a road trip instead to Philadelphia.

  “Oh, no,” he said. “I’m fine.”

  —

  Back in San Francisco, in the apartment Ilya had just moved into, his roommate, Gardner Bickford, had not seen him in weeks. Gardner texted and asked Ilya if he wanted him to find a new roommate. Despite his absence, Ilya had been prompt with the rent. He told Gardner to hang on, he’d be back in January.

  His partners at Diaspora were not so sure.

  —

  For Christmas, Dan bought himself a better pair of headphones than the ones he already had. At work, they blocked out the world, kept him thinking about only what was in front of him on the screen and no peripheral conversation. “I don’t know what I would spend money on,” he said over a beer. “I don’t have time to spend money. All I do is work, think about the project, and sleep.”

  Dan Grippi would never strike anyone as monk material, but he had left himself behind working on Diaspora, burrowing into a kind of hermitage. In high school, he had run cross-country, a test of solitary endurance; at Diaspora, he spent much of the day in front of his screen, speaking little, a reticence that could be mistaken for arrogance instead of shyness.

  During the break, his father had been speaking to him about taking his skills into the business world. Banks were always looking to hire people like him. Dan was not interested. “I don’t see why someone would go to college just to get out and have someone else tell you what to do,” Dan said. “And we have had it easy—we actually got everything handed to us on a silver platter.”

  Now the project was gunning along. New fixes, better features, a trickle of new invites distributed every few weeks.

  The departure of Ilya had infuriated him, in part because he, too, was so unhappy in San Francisco, and they had relied on each other in ways that the others did not have to—the Sofaers were in northern California, and Max’s high school buddy Dan Goldenberg had moved in with him. By happy chance, other friends of Max were also in the Bay Area. In walking out, Ilya had not only left the project one man short but ditched Dan on an emotional level.

  “I took it personally,” Dan said. “Rafi has his brothers. He has his family in San Francisco. So great, he’s back home. Max has all of his friends in San Francisco. I know absolutely nobody. I’m busting my ass. Same exact thing, similar situation. I’m dealing with it just fine. Then he just bails? No way. Totally fucked. It is what it is.”

  There were negotiations afoot to allow Ilya to come back on a provisional basis, to see if he could tolerate it for a week or so. And at the request of Ilya, Mike Sofaer also was urging the three guys to let him back. Dan was still opposed. If the guy was sick, he needed to be home. The Diaspora project was not a way to convalesce.

  Dan could not stand living in San Francisco, yet when he was back east for Christmas, he counted the minutes until he returned. He had been unable to detach himself from the all-absorbing demands of Diaspora. Why not do it remotely and collaborate via computer with Max and whoever was in San Francisco, and have a life in New York?

  “As much as I love New York, the project needs me in San Francisco,” Dan said. “You’re going to be left out of the loop if you’re not in the same spot.”

  —

  All hands were back in the Pivotal offices at the beginning of January, Ilya included. It was more than passing awkward. Seated ten feet away, Dan did not speak to him for a solid week. The freeze-out ended when Dan called a meeting at a coffee shop to discuss the future of the project. They ended up on the same side of an argument. By Monday, they were pair programming together. Ilya was reengaged, but not single-mindedly. Since discovering Kickstarter for Diaspora, he had pitched in small contributions to other campaigns, including one for a rooftop farm in Brooklyn, a project to record classical musical and release it without copyright restrictions, and a book on punk mathematics that promised to explain “better living through probability” and “using orders of magnitude to detect bullshit.”

  Now something else had caught his eye: Eben Moglen had turned to Kickstarter to raise money for his Freedom Box project, the pocket-sized server that people would be able to plug into a bedroom and use for all their communications. It was the ultimate in federation or decentralization.

  Ilya posted a note on the Diaspora page: “With much nerd love, just backed The Freedom Box.”

  There was not much direct conversation between Ilya and the others about his departure. Mike Sofaer had worked hard to talk Dan and Max past their fury. Yes, they were right to feel jerked around, and that they had been left hanging.

  “Look,” Mike said. “It isn’t a huge risk that it will happen again.”

  Soon, Ilya was absorbed again by Diaspora—and also by roiling developments on the other side of the world, introduced to him by Yosem Companys, the group’s cheerleader and friend.

  —

  In the first months of 2011, as the uprising in Egypt accelerated, Yosem found himself working all hours to run the Twitter account for a group called Liberation Technology, which consisted of people interested in deploying emerging technologies to bring about social change. Their virtual commune was an e-mail list and Twitter. When Hosni Mubarak’s government shut down the Internet ahead of a planned “Friday of Anger” on January 28 in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, the Twitter account for Liberation Technology almost instantly became part of a digital bypass.

  Activists in Egypt—and other countries, like Libya, Yemen, and Bahrain, where revolution was in the air—were still able to get messages through to Twitter (in fact, Google and Twitter set up a relay system, in which voice messages left on a phone system operated by Google were transcribed and posted to Twitter).

  Yosem would pick up urgent messages and relay them to sympathetic hackers, including, most prominently, Jacob Appelbaum, a leading security researcher. There were many others, including Ilya, who fielded requests for technical help. Sometimes Ilya helped keep servers going when they came under attack. He also helped the activists regain Internet connectivity via satellites. He wound up conferring with an Egyptian technologist he’d met at a conference in Berlin.

  He set up an Arab Spring Diaspora pod. “Some activists used the dedicated Diaspora Arab Spring pod to communicate because it was not as prominent as Facebook and Twitter and thus could sneak under the regimes’ radars when the regimes started cracking down on Twitter and Facebook,” Yosem said. But there was no technical stealth built into the Diaspora code, he noted: “It had everything to do with governments’ ignorance of Diaspora. In fact, Diaspora was riddled with holes and was not a secure solution. It was just a good enough decentralized one.” Not long after the Arab Spring roared to life, three Diaspora pods turned up in China.

  “Did you see these?” Yosem asked Ilya.

  “Yeah,” Ilya said. “I met some Chinese activists online, and they’re using it to circumvent censorship.”

  Always cautious about his own position, and jeopardizing the status of Diaspora, Ilya shrouded this part of his life. When he and I next met and talked about the events in the Middle East, he mentioned that he was keeping trac
k of what was going on, but did not volunteer that he had been providing assistance, however limited, to the activists. Max, Dan, and Rafi knew nothing about it. In fact, a month after Mubarak shut down the Internet, Dan and Rafi were back in New York to speak at a free-culture conference. During the question period, a man asked: “Have you ever proposed that the Diaspora tool could be a way to communicate during moments of protest? A space that is safe to share information, sort of off the radar?”

  “Diaspora right now is not a system made to be operated in an environment where people are trying to take it down,” Rafi said. “Hopefully, one day it will be able to operate at that level of robustness.”

  Plus, he said: “What makes a system useful in those situations is really social penetration. The fact that a lot of people are on Facebook, that a lot of people are able to see what is going on on Twitter, makes them useful in those hazardous moments.

  “I don’t think that’s our target market right now—revolutions.”

  Well, someone else asked, how about setting up a mesh network—a kind of local Internet, rooftop to rooftop, not vulnerable to centralized shutdowns like what happened in Egypt? Rafi politely sidestepped the role of digital messiah.

  “I think that’s a great idea; it’s something I’d like to work on someday. It’s not what I am working on right now. I think that New York City is a good place to experiment on with that, because of its density.”

  He paused for a second, then lobbed the suggestion back to the audience.

  “And—do it.”

  —

  Toward the end of January, the four guys were given an invitation to an afternoon rubbing shoulders with wealthy young investors and hackers who hoped to get that way in a Silicon Valley incubator called Sunfire Offices. It had been started by former engineer managers for Google and Facebook. On Thursdays, they held mixers with promising start-ups, including people working in the Sunfire space and young people floating around with small fortunes made in technology who were looking for new ways to engage with the world. Invitations were hard to come by, and the Diaspora crew was thrilled to be asked. A company called Flipboard would be giving a presentation before the social hour.